Homebrews - Who's starting over?

[Nyaricus]

Thanks, Ny. I wanted an outside opinion.

Still on the thread, isn't it? I thought I had subscribed to it for when I was ready to flesh out the moon, but I can't find it.......

I'll see if I stuck it in a file already, then get back to you.

RC

No prob RC

As for the thread, it was right before The Crash last year (and thus was lost), and I didn't save it - and I was curious if you had at all....

cheers,
--N

 

[Jack99]

Over the years, my campaign settings have gone from being FR-style to being Points of Lights-style. So I think I am going to start over, this time with a truely PoL-style campaign.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Hey Mike,
I had this discussion with my players and my fellow DM this last session and we kind of came to this conclusion: We have a very expansive campaign with epic scope that no one is willing to just stop and drop. The designers have stated many times that conversion is not worth the effort, so we have decided to play it middle of the road. We have a small core group play-test (our current party numbers 12 and is ran by two DMs simultaneously) the rules in April with the quick start module.
If it appears that the rules are just too alien or unwieldy then we will finish the campaign (which may take three or four years to complete) and then convert to 4e. If it means work to convert but isn't completely impossible (we do have gnomes in the party so it could get hairy) then I'll take a month or two off and come up with a reasonable re-design to use.
There isn't enough information to say we will or will not do anything, but we have been planning the contingencies just in case. Considering a large group of us are former service members, contingency plans are just Standard Operational Procedure (SOP).

 

[Festivus]

I will certainly keep my setting. Some NPCs will get changed around beneath the hood.

I've consciously stayed away from having a setting tied too closely to mechanics.

Same as Whizbang, I spent a lot of money to purchase Ptolus, too much to simply toss it aside. It's mostly fluff anyhow, and the cross-referencing inside makes it very easy for my to run off the cuff adventures with very little planning.

 

[Michael Morris]

Here's my thoughts - I'm torn.

Dusk has been through a lot of changes since I first started adventures in it in 1989 just as 2e was coming out. It's pretty much unrecognizable. The first version was built around the trite "save the world from the uber powerful bad guy by assembling nifty artifact" plot. As I brought it to the net I rolled the timeline back 200 years to the time just before this upheaval. I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I should do a massive timeline shift again. Maybe to after the upheaval?

It would be fun to run the game not knowing what lies in the future again. I have some attachment to the status quo, but my players don't and the online community certainly doesn't so it's very much up in the air.

But there is a catch. I want Dusk to be the assumed setting of the toolset I'm writing for 4e after ENWorld is updated (things are proceeding smoothly on this front btw). Since the d20 license cannot be attached to software in any form the tools must be OGL only. There are several reasons why this is important that I don't want to give away, nonetheless I want the feel of the setting to be close to this 'points of light' business because, well, it does sound cool. So, how does this stuff sound.

Imagine a world where the heroes blew fumbled the ball. The big bad evil guy was stopped in the end, but not before a lot of damage - i.e. the status quo - was destroyed. No one who survived has understood or remembers exactly what has occurred. It is 300 years later (or 500 years after the date of the campaign materials I have released online).

The Reincardia has come and gone. One of the two suns Carthasana orbits has been dislodged and flung out into an orbit as far from the main sun as Uranus is from our sun. Carthasana's orbit has contracted and slowed down to a more normal 365 day one. Forget the physics of how for a moment and just say the gods did it - this is a fantasy world in the end anyway. Neverless Carthasana now is odd to say the least since for half the year there isn't a true night. A Sun sized star at Uranus distance to earth would be roughly twice as bright as the full moon - bright enough to create twilight conditions in the middle of the night but not bright enough to give any appreciable warmth. Hence, a cold sun and a hot sun.

Parts of the world are out of phase. You can literally walk into one of Carthasana's five outer planes and not find your way back. Telzoa has become this way for Mt. Chardual has erupted bathing that massive island in fire and ripping it into Shunria (the red plane of earth and fire) itself. While you can sail into Telzoa, you cannot easily sail back. Other sections have been ripped into other other planes. This is a world where walking into the aether is very, very possible.

Losineris was the stage of the first campaigns pre-net days -- Telzoa was the stage of things on the net up till now - the third stage I thinking of using the Malazan islands far to the south. Here the players will know of one island - their island - and the world beyond is, well, unknown. Survivors of a great calamnity no one has recorded, none who have ventured off the island have returned for over a century. What has happened beyond the shores of this island.

Believing themselves alone in the world an uneasy peace has fell. Memories faded to all but the elves of the island, and even they only remember what they where told by their grandparents. Content to exist on a small island with no real dangers until once day the remains of a shipwreck wash up on shore...

... They are not alone after all.

Thoughts?

 

[Davelozzi]

My homebrew campaign is currently on hiatus while we play Red Hand of Doom, though the reason for the hiatus is really that I don't have enough time to do all the work for it anymore.

So it might be a moot point. I think it's likely that adventure paths are pretty much the way of the future for me.

That said, I do like the homebrew and would like to run it some more. Most likely if I continue the existing campaign, we will use 3.5 if I'm aiming to have a limited run and wrap up the loose ends, but would consider switching to 4.0 if it's good enough.

If I was to start a new campaign in my existing homebrew world, assuming that I consider 4e to be an improvement (I'm optimistic), I would probably use it, simply ignoring any races/classes or other issues that don't fit my image of the world, or figure out a way to work in any that I liked enough to warrant it.

So in short, anything could happen.

 

[No Name]

I'll probably convert.

The PCs can investigate the mysterious, world-wide disappearance of gnomes, bards, and monks for their first adventure. Perhaps the kobolds (thanks to the leadership of Meepo) finally eradicated their rivals. Or maybe the gnomes, forseeing some horrible future disaster, travel back in time, and then have an ideological split - becoming the first dwarves and halflings.

 

[Evilhalfling]

No idea - my current game will likely end before x-mas, or at least go on sabatical while another DM runs for a while. I won't run a 4e world until I have all 3 books, and have discussed it with the group.

In going from 3.0-3.5 I switched contients. Tried some of the rule changes, and returned to the orginal contients as a full 3.5 game. Later I stayed on land mass1 and moved it forward 700 yrs, to a age of reason atmposphere. This hasnt worked out as well as I liked.

For a full 4.0 game I will probably try landmass2 somewhere between the two dates.
as for race changes - no gnomes - check
2 tribes of elves that could be treated differently - check
monks and bards out - these were a minor part of the setting, although both were more integrated into landmass1 than landmass2

The only thing that is for sure is that halflings will remain psionically inclined, with a tendency to produce misguided villians. This will necessitate a hybrid game, at least until Psionics returns.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I start from scratch for every campaign. Of course, this is the reason I don't homebrew that much anymore. I use adventure paths a lot these days.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Here's my thoughts - I'm torn.

*snip*

Thoughts?

Well, not so much thoughts as just a notice that I plan to plagiarize this mercilessly for my next campaign. I especially like the bit about the cold star.